September 5, 2003

Welcome to the speed column…

I have 45 minutes to write this before the internet café across the street from my hotel closes up, so speed counts. (The modem for my laptop is missing… don’t ask.)

The day started with a surprise. Fox had an early screening of Alien, which was attached to possible sit down with Ridley Scott. Sudden must see. And man, oh man, what a joy it was to see this movie with great sound 24 years later. Make no mistake, the “director’s cut” is not much different than the original. The one added scene, the infamous Dallas-in-a-cocoon bit real doesn’t fit in at this point. I’m sure if it was added back at the start, the cut would have made sense. Here, it feels completely superfluous.

BUT… great freakin’movie. It is easy to forget many of the details… like that Yaphet Kotto and Tom Skerritt were the only real names, in America at least, and that Sigourney Weaver was a complete unknown and a complete surprise as the sole survivor. It’s easy to forget how little of the Alien we saw. Seeing a young Ian Holm… the Laurel & Hardy/Beavis & Butthead routine by Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton… the simple reality of a cargo ship in space…

Alien is a treat of slow moving thrills, effects that would only be hurt by CG and sound… oh that amazing sound. Listen for the heartbeat. Hear that constant drip, drip, drip. The sound of the human body being challenged to hold together. And the silence. That silence. In space, no one can hear you scream indeed.

Before I got to Alien, I blithely caught 45 minutes of Gun-Shy, a German film by Dito Tsintsadze. I went because I had time and it was on the schedule. Yawn. But after a start that got me a little worried with its lethargy, a beautiful red head drops a note in the lap of our sleepy (but good looking in a Chris O'Donnell kind of way) hero that reads, “Save me.”

Cool. Something’s going to happen.

But our heroine is a bit of a mystery. She is overt, yet secretive. Sexy, yet unavailable. In his life, yet in some completely different life.

And then, I left to go see Alien.

I want to see the rest of Gun-Shy, which I am feeling really great about, especially after reading the synopsis in the program guide, which indicates that the story goes in a whole different direction indeed. And I must admit, the female lead, Lavinia Wilson, is remarkably sexy. She has some of that Julianne Moore thing, combined with some of the Molly Parker thing, with a thing all of her own. And Tsintsadze shoots her in a way that accentuates her womanliness without exploiting here. More to come…

Next, it was on to Bon Voyage, the new film from Jean-Paul Rappeneau. Set in France, just before and during the occupation of France by the Germans in WWII. We get Isabelle Adjani, a thin-looking Gerard Depardieu and a graceful Virginie Ledoyen, but newcomer Yvan Attai is the actual lead of the picture.

Again, I short-ended this film, but I am not quite as anxious to get back to this one. Rappeneau seems to be intent on shifting speeds from scene to scene, running from farce to subtle comedy to drama. And in what I saw, it felt forced. Now, it is ridiculous to make a determination on a two hour film in just one hour. Perhaps is all came together into something more than pleasant in the second hour. I’m sure I will find out some day.

What I rushed out for was a screening of Girl With The Pearl Earring, highly touted as a Scarlett Johansson Oscar vehicle. Nope.

Love Scarlett, love Colin Firth, love Judy Parfitt and thrilled by finding Essie Davis, which I don’t recall seeing every before. I even love Vermeer. Well, I like his stuff a lot. But I found Girl With The Pearl Earring to be nearly the height of boredom. I didn’t like it the first time around when Tom Wilkinson (whose work I also love and who co-stars in this film) and Minnie Driver did it in The Governess. But at least I was kept awake by the opportunity to see Minnie expose her bosom… and even better, I saw it in a theater with Winona Ryder, who was dating Minnie’s ex at the time, there checking out the competition.

I love a good class struggle love story. But being a story of manners is not enough. The emotional theme, that the power of Vermeer’s art drew some women into his vortex and made them his willing victims, did not play out in the story. I’m pretty comfortable with subtle, but dear lord, there needs to be at least a light pulse beating.

If you like Scarlett Johansson, go see Lost In Translation. If you like Colin Firth, rent What A Girl Wants. If you like Judy Parfitt, rent the vastly underrated Delores Clairborne. And if you like films about great artists, it’s back to Adaptation for you!

I was supposed to see Neil Young perform, but I was hijacked by unnamed assassins who took me to Bistro 990 and stuffed my face with quality T.O. foods. The room was rollicking with various movers & shovers wandering and drinking and eating and laughing in the way the they have been at 990 for years. And I’ve never seen Baked Alaska off of a cruise ship before. Ours was not flaming.

More adventures to come today. I have been talked out of an early morning screening of Underworld and will now go to the midnight screening on Monday. The Human Stain, The Tesseract and The Event are on the schedule right now. And I will probably catch the rest of Gun-Shy too.

Saturday offers the new Guy Maddin, The Saddest Music In The World, acquisition bait Bright Young Things, Van Sant’s Elephant, the French pick-up by Paramount Classics, Jeux d’Efants, Dogville and at least one more film.

On Sunday, 21 Grams and Love Actually highlight the day, which will also include Allan King’s new doc, Dying at Grace.

On Monday, you’ll know how it all went. Have a great weekend.

E ME: You having a quiet weekend too?